It’s been a busy year, and as you can tell I’ve neglected to update my website. Mostly, I’ve been writing my dissertation. But I’ve also published a few things here and there. In September, I wrote a piece for Upside Down World, which recently relaunched, on the three year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero. I also wrote essay on NAFTA and impacts on autoworkers in Mexico, for the North American Congress on Latin America, whose board I also recently joined. And, finally, I’ll share a longer, peer reviewed article sussing out how prohibition works to fund armed groups in Mexico and Latin America, which was published in the Mexican Law Review.

It took a few tries before the taxi driver taking me to meet Lorena Cabnal found his way to her address. We drove up and down streets along the outskirts of Guatemala City, directions made confusing by the profusion of closed-off neighborhoods. Here, residents simply block streets and put up barriers to prevent cars from circulating, paying a guard to monitor who goes in and out. These aren’t the private gated communities of the rich, but rather survival strategies of the poor and working class in Central America’s largest metropolis.

Finally, we found Cabnal’s apartment, and I called up to where she was staying. I was buzzed in and climbed a flight of stairs, where I waited on a modest loveseat in the narrow entryway. A lit candle burned beside a printed photograph of murdered Honduran activist Berta Cáceres.

Cabnal is a Maya-Xinca woman who considers herself a communitarian feminist. She works with a network of healers in Guatemala, and she lives in this unlikely location, far from the buzzing core of activism in downtown Guatemala City, for her own protection after threats related to her political activism.

“It’s not true that in [Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador] there has been an economic stimulus that has developed and strengthened education, health, and infrastructure,” said Cabnal, looking at me from behind thick framed glasses. “Quite the contrary: Impoverishment has gotten worse, and the big security problems haven’t been resolved.”In addition to performing traditional healing work for activists and others seeking aid, Cabnal works to support political prisoners in Guatemala, most of them incarcerated because of their role in land defense. Today, she’s speaking out against the Alliance for Prosperity, a new US-backed aid program that is supposed to stem the flow of migrants from Central America toward the north.

In 2014, people around the United States began to learn that thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America were turning up at the US-Mexico Border. In June of 2014, the ACLU and others filed a complaint on behalf of 116 youth against US Customs and Border Protection. According to the complaint, one young woman was raped by a border agent, and another was held in a freezer and forced to drink water from a toilet. By the spring of 2015, a record number of children had crossed the border, most of them from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. To shift the narrative, the US government had to come up with a response to the crisis.

As if on cue, the Alliance for Prosperity was announced by the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras at an event at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) headquarters in November of 2014.

“Officially, the Alliance for Prosperity is not a US creation. Officially, it was created by these three countries; they came together and asked the IDB for help in putting the plan together,” said Alexander Main, the senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “It just very much looks like the US played a big role in facilitating this plan and moving it forward, and was quite possibly completely behind this plan since the beginning. We don’t quite have evidence of that, but it came at the exact moment when the administration was talking about tackling the root causes of migration.”

For Cabnal, the timing is more than a coincidence. It’s perverse. “I think that justifying the Alliance for Prosperity in the context of what happened in 2013 and 2014, when they talked about a huge migration of unaccompanied boys and girls to the US, I think it is twisted,” said Cabnal. “Really, what they want to justify is a neoliberal reconfiguration of these governments.” It is the long-term economic concerns of the elite that drive the Alliance for Prosperity, in Cabnal’s view, not the systemic change Central America needs if migration is to be meaningfully reduced.

The Alliance for Prosperity “is about creating continuity with already signed agreements. I’m talking about the Plan Puebla Panama,” said Cabnal. She sees the Alliance for Prosperity as operationalizing these previous plans, but without sparking the same level of social protest or debate. Elite business federations from all three countries were involved in drafting the plan, which was completed without participation from migrant organizations or civil society groups. And the Alliance for Prosperity is likely to carry on through the presidency of Donald Trump: When outgoing Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Guatemala to advance the plan in 2015, he was joined by Gen. John Kelly, then commander of US Southern Command who is now Trump’s pick to head the Department of Homeland Security.

Total investment over the five years of the plan was initially set at $22 billion, most of it coming from host governments. The United States promised to provide $1 billion per year over five years, but in 2016, total US funding for all of Central America was shy of $750 million. The US government counts funding for development, military assistance, and the continuation of the Central America Regional Security Initiative, which is Washington’s anti-narcotics strategy in the region, as part of the Alliance for Prosperity. This vision of combating migration from Central America sees increased foreign investment and new infrastructure tied to police training and militarization as the solution to the crisis. For many, it sounds like the same policies that have made the Northern Triangle into such an unequal and violent place.

Fernando Solís, who is a journalist and editor of the Guatemalan magazine El Observador, thinks that the ongoing security and economic crises in the region tend to obscure the fact that the Northern Triangle is a key political and economic enclave for the United States. We spoke in his office in Guatemala City, at a long table under glaring fluorescent lights. “On the one hand, it is a security strategy based on contention and social control, which attempts to create governance mechanisms in these countries,” said Solís, who sees the Alliance for Prosperity as a mechanism for US and local elites to maintain commercial and political influence in the area. “The second part, which I think is a long-term plan that is connected to the first, is the investment plan, the US economic plan.”

A few days after I first met Cabnal, I saw her again. This time, she was under a small tent washing the feet of women who had walked hundreds of kilometers from their hometowns into Guatemala City’s central park. With a mix of herbs and warm water, Cabnal massaged heels and toes, soothing injuries and easing pain.

The occasion was a national March for Water, a massive protest that brought together indigenous people and peasants denouncing industry and insisting on their right to access clean water in Guatemala. It was the first major mobilization since anti-corruption protests and a complex corruption scandal sent former President Otto Perez Molina, Vice President Roxana Baldetti, and three ministers from the halls of congress into prison cells in 2015.

“The marches that took place last year were centered on corruption in the political system,” said Jovita Tzul Tzul, a Maya K’iche’ lawyer based in Guatemala City. Tzul Tzul said longstanding concerns of indigenous and rural people were not given the weight they deserved in anti-corruption marches. I spoke with her as we awaited tens of thousands of people who were entering the city on Reforma Avenue, a wide street lined with prestigious hotels and banks, and home to the US embassy and the Guatemalan defense ministry. “Today is the day that we join together to demand the protection of water,” said Tzul Tzul.

Hundreds of participants in the March for Water walked for three weeks to arrive at the capital, most of them from communities along the western part of the border with Mexico. By the time the march reached the capital, it had swollen to include delegations from around the country, and easily filled the city’s central square. The protesters ranged from mothers carrying their infant children to elders and teenagers, together denouncing the construction of new dams, the overuse of water by agro-industry, and the increase in dirty maquiladoras dumping waste into rivers. “They have made money, while we in the general population have ended up without water,” said Gaspar Lobo, a 73-year-old Maya Poqomam leader from near the city of Escuintla. He complained of invasions of communal land, a wave of new maquilas, and rumors of a new oil pipeline in the region.

The demands of the marchers fly in the face of proposals laid out in the Alliance for Prosperity, which is in large part a plan to build new infrastructure that will benefit transnational corporations. A key plank in the plan is to build a new gas pipeline from Salina Cruz, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, approximately 650 kilometers south along the west coast to Escuintla, Guatemala. This key pipeline route will connect Mexico to Central America, opening a new market for natural gas producers in the United States to export piped gas to Central America.

The Alliance for Prosperity proposes eight new logistics corridors to speed the flow of goods through the region, as well as new energy interconnection infrastructure and doubling the capacity of the electrical grid. Overlaying the maps of Plan Puebla Panama, later called Plan Mesoamerica, and the Alliance for Prosperity, it is immediately evident that the latter truly is an updated version of the former. In short, the centerpiece of the Alliance for Prosperity involves tax breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power lines to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of import, assembly, and export at low-wage maquilas.

These are the very things that community leaders in Central America are risking their lives to prevent.

Environmental conflicts have burned strong in Honduras and El Salvador as well. In March, people around the world were shocked to learn of the death of indigenous leader and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres in Honduras. Cáceres was an activist involved in a variety of local and regional social movements, but it is believed that it was her involvement as a leader in the struggle against a hydroelectric dam on Lenca territories that made her a target. It is just this kind of project that the Alliance for Prosperity sets forth as a way out of poverty. The London-based human rights organization Global Witness documented 18 killings of environmental activists in Guatemala and Honduras last year, many of which were linked to anti-dam organizing. In El Salvador, community opposition to large-scale mining has also led to the killing and disappearance of activists.

“There is a very strong repression toward communities who resist what is basically the privatization of their water and their lands, and there’s a very strong conflict between the way of life and the economic model,” said Juan Jeremías Castro Simón, a lawyer with the Association of Mayan Lawyers and Notaries of Guatemala (Nim Ajpú). “There is a community-based economic model, based on buen vivir [living well or good living], and there is an economic model that individualizes and appropriates [shared] goods.” Castro Simón is involved with numerous cases involving reclamation of communal lands by indigenous communities in Guatemala. He and his colleagues at the Nim Ajpú have litigated successfully for the return of communal lands, and achieved the cancellation of mining concessions and other contracts in various parts of the country.

Guatemala’s new president, Jimmy Morales, who was voted in during an election that was already scheduled when the corruption scandal hit last year, has done little to reassure Guatemalans that he’s going to turn things around. Rather, he’s made agreements with hard-line military factions and jumped to do Washington’s bidding. Morales is akin to a Central American version of Donald Trump, basing his candidacy on his past as a comedian and political outsider offering a clean break from the political class. In April, Morales extended an olive branch to Trump. “To the gentleman who wants to build a wall, I offer cheap labor,” he toldThe New York Times en Español.

The number of unaccompanied minors apprehended in the United States spiked to 68,541 in 2014, dropped by nearly half in 2015, and in fiscal year 2016, which ended September 30, climbed back up to just shy of 60,000. But it isn’t the Alliance for Prosperity that changed conditions on the ground. Rather, the 2015 drop was due to the Washington’s increased cooperation with Mexican border guards in efforts to keep Central Americans from coming north. “In 2011, Mexico apprehended some 4,000 adolescents and children from northern Central America. That rose to about 23,000 in 2014 and nearly 35,000 in 2015,” according to a July 2016 report by the International Crisis Group. In 2015, Mexico deported 165,000 Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans, more than twice the number deported from the United States.

Activists say migrants who are detained by Mexican agents are routinely subjected to torture. Migrants detained by organized criminal groups, often working closely with state officials, often fare much worse. Even massive investments, like the Alliance for Prosperity, are small in comparison to the amount of money migrants working abroad send home.

“The US is going to put up $750 million, or something like that, for the three countries, if we pass a series of laws as a condition,” said Sandra Morán, who was elected to congress last year as part of a minute leftist bloc. According to Morán, this year in Guatemala alone, it is estimated that migrants working abroad will send back $6.6 billion. “We are drowning, and this is what is causing more migration to the United States, and that has become a problem for the US,” said Morán. “These remittances are for survival.”

The small copper horseshoe Mario Vergara Hernández keeps in the pocket of his jeans isn’t there for good luck. It has another purpose altogether. “Since I started looking for graves, I carry this horseshoe in my pocket, because if they find me in a common grave, the metal won’t disintegrate,” said Vergara Hernández, palming the charm as we sat beside a hole he was helping to dig. “I told my mother that if I disappear, she should tell the government to look for the metal. I just hope they bury me with my pants on.”

With that, he stood and declared that the hole he and two other men—both of them fathers whose sons had been disappeared—were digging didn’t contain any corpses. With pick and shovel, they had dug to a level of clay that was undisturbed; there could be nothing buried further beneath it. While the men dug, the women waited under a tree, a light breeze relieving the near 100-degree heat and extreme humidity. They had come to this spot after a tip by a local drug runner, who said his own family members had been secretly buried near a large tree in a field outside of the city of Iguala, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.

Every Sunday, Vergara Hernández leads a group organized under the name Los Otros Desaparecidos de Iguala (The Other Disappeared of Iguala) into the hills surrounding the city. They’re akin to a self-taught search team, comprising family members of people who have been disappeared from the region. The group works off hand-drawn maps, messages on WhatsApp and Facebook, and tips from folks who, somehow or another, have seen bodies being buried late into the night. When we arrive at the site the searchers fan out, expertly scanning the ground, looking for upturned soil or disturbed plants as they hunt for mass graves, with the hope of identifying a loved one.
Los Otros Desaparecidos de Iguala came together after the infamous disappearance of 43 students by local police in concert with local paramilitaries two years ago, on September 26, 2014. But it wasn’t until the discovery of 38 bodies in the weeks following the disappearances that the media storm began. As grave after grave was turned up outside of Iguala, Argentine forensic experts identified the remains of Alexander Mora Venancio, one of the 43 students. The other 42 young men are still disappeared.

The bodies kept coming as mounting protests against the mass disappearances brought out more and more family members from Iguala. “The tragedy of the 43 happened, here in Iguala, and the parents held marches, and my sisters went and said that they too are missing their brother,” said Vergara Hernández, whose brother Tomás has been missing since July 5, 2012. “There, they met more families who brought photos of their disappeared family members, and that is how Los Otros Desaparecidos de Iguala was formed.” Since they started searching in November of 2014, the group has found 145 bodies. Sixteen of them have been identified and returned to their families for burial.

The plight of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School has captured the world’s attention, with high-level investigations and ongoing public demonstrations demanding their return alive. The Mexican government continues to say the students were killed and their bodies burned in a garbage dump near Iguala, a claim thoroughly discredited by international experts. To this day, there is no convincing explanation of where the 43 students might have been taken after they were disappeared. This has translated into a serious crisis of legitimacy for all levels of government in Mexico. During this national institutional crisis, the work of self-trained searchers has quietly proliferated throughout the country. Their work is a response to the spectacular violence that has accompanied the US-backed war on drugs in Mexico.

It takes some measure of imagination to comprehend the reach and intensity of drug-war violence in Mexico. In 2014, Mexico ranked as the country with the third-most civilians killed in internal conflict, after Syria and Iraq. Bodies have been buried, burned, displayed in public places, hung from bridges and overpasses, or beheaded and left at city hall. The lifespan of Mexican men has fallen due to the increase in homicides since the war on drugs began in December 2006. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because of violence, from urban areas and rural ranches alike.

Much of the violence and terror is state directed. Drug cartels, which operate more like paramilitary groups, are often indistinguishable from local and state police, and form networks dedicated to extortion, kidnapping, and killing, all of which increases social control and helps to suppress dissent. Militarized federal police carry out offensives, supposedly against drug traffickers; where they do so, overall homicide rates have tended to rise. The army has been deployed to fight drug trafficking, in what Dr. Richard Downie of the National Defense University in Washington, DC, says has led to “the best US/Mexican military-to-military and defense relations in decades.” The New York Times reported in May that Mexican soldiers kill eight people for every one they injure; the kill rate for the Mexico’s Marines is 30 to 1.

When it comes to disappearances, official numbers are staggering—but they represent a fraction of the total. According to the Mexican government, as cited by Amnesty International, 27,638 people have been registered as disappeared or missing since 2006. Nearly half of the disappearances have taken place since December 2012, during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto.

Informally, it is known that the number of disappeared is much higher. The official number only counts Mexicans who have been disappeared. Advocates for Central American migrants have said tens of thousands have been disappeared in transit through Mexico, but there is no centralized record keeping. In Iguala, Vergara Hernández said his group includes over 500 families with at least one disappearance. Of those, he says, only 215 cases have been reported to police.

The situation is similar in Coahuila, whose southern border is about 700 miles north of Guerrero, where another group of searchers in the city of Torreón say state officials are underreporting the number of people disappeared by a factor of six. “They insist that there are 579 people disappeared,” said Silvia Ortíz, who leads Grupo VIDA, a search group made up of family members of people disappeared in Torreón. “But that doesn’t include those who didn’t make a complaint. There’s around 3,500, more or less, people disappeared.”

Ortiz and her husband, Oscar Sánchez de Viesca, have been looking for their daughter Stephanie “Fanny” Sánchez de Viesca Ortiz since she was disappeared on May 10, 2005. But many families choose to go on living as if nothing happened after a loved one is disappeared, for fear of further violence and direct threats from state officials if they make a formal complaint.

In Torreón, Grupo VIDA (the acronym stands for Victims for our Rights in Action) got together after they heard about the searches in Iguala. Ortiz, like many mothers with missing daughters, undertook her own search, even opening a case with the FBI after a tip that her daughter was in Texas. “I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, and when I saw the searchers in Iguala starting to look, I said, it’s now or never,” said Ortiz.

Torreón is an industrial city of just over 600,000 that’s part of a larger urban area almost exactly 500 miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas. The area was at the heart of Mexico’s cotton boom, but since the 1990s the city has followed in the footsteps of border towns like Ciudad Juárez, with low-wage manufacturing dominating the local economy. Torreón and the conjoining municipality of Matamoros were hit hard by the US-backed war on drugs. As the area was militarized, the murder rate spiked from an average of 43 killings a year from 2000 to 2007, to over 825 murders in 2012 alone.

“There was really a sensation that we lived in a very peaceful city, and in effect, we did,” said Carlos Castañón, an analyst in Torreón. We spoke in a cafe that had opened just six months prior, as people began to go out again in the city’s downtown after years of violence. “Beginning in 2007, every year afterward until 2012 was worse than the one before, which is to say each year there were more deaths, more killings, more homicides, and a significant increase in stolen vehicles, kidnappings, and extortions,” he said.

Torreón is located at a strategic crossroads between the railways and highways up to El Paso and Laredo, Texas. Local lore has it that the former governor of Coahuila, Humberto Moreira, allowed the Zetas drug cartel to enter Coahuila in exchange for huge personal gain, and it was a fight between Zetas and members of the Sinaloa cartel that led to extreme levels of violence in the city. But there are other players, as federal police and soldiers were also deployed to the city, and municipal police supervised the bulk of criminal activity.

The city became a war zone. “If you look at the kinds of weapons they used here, you’ll find grenades, bazookas, and Barretts [a 50-caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle],” said Castañón. At the height of the violence, prisoners were released from a nearby jail in Durango state at night, crossing over to Torreón and opening fire on bars, nightclubs, and parties, killing dozens at a time. The city was a war zone, and the bare, dry farmlands that surround it were transformed into killing fields.

It is into those fields that Grupo VIDA trudges every Saturday, looking for their loved ones who were swept up during the violence. Here, they don’t look for graves exactly, but for bones and bone fragments. Unlike in the south of Mexico, bodies here are rarely buried: The favorite disposal method of the killers was to mix bodies with diesel and cook them in 55-gallon drums until only shards remained.

No one knows why so many people have been disappeared in Mexico. The disappeared here, for the most part, are not political activists. Rather, they are people from poor and working-class families, and most of them are men. The government and mainstream media stigmatize the disappeared, alleging that they must have been involved in criminal activity. Family members speculate that their loved ones are being forced to work for drug cartels, or that disappeared young women are made to work in the sex trade. The only sure thing is that the state provides a total screen of impunity, a context in which kidnapping and killing can happen on a massive scale and almost always go unpunished.

And so we walk. After a tip brings the group back to a spot they call “Patrocinio” for the eleventh time, we take off in groups of two or three in all directions, scanning the desert floor. The only interruptions are a row of trees far off to our right, and a smattering of abandoned buildings on the horizon. I walk alongside Rosa Maria Flores Garcia while her 8-year-old grandson runs circles around us and her adolescent granddaughter walks quietly, preening, shading the sun with her hand so as not to upset her hairstyle with a hat.

Flores Garcia’s son Sergio Vazquez Flores, father to the two grandchildren who walk with us, was disappeared on February 1, 2010. The way Flores Garcia tells it, Sergio stepped out to buy a soda that day at around 9:30 in the morning and never came back. He was 26. “Everything ended when that happened; there’s no joy anymore,” said Flores Garcia, stopping to scoop the earth with a shovel. Flores Garcia works six days a week cleaning houses and serving tacos, for which she makes about $44. Every Saturday she joins Grupo VIDA to search for bones in the desert.

Eventually the searchers go down on their hands and knees around a spot where dozens of small, charred bone fragments are lying exposed. There’s no sniffing dogs or special protocol: The bones are lifted from the desert ground and placed into a plastic bag. Many will be too burned to carry DNA. Of the hundreds of bone fragments Grupo VIDA has turned over to authorities in the year and a half since they started their searches, not a single one has been DNA-matched.

Bottom-up strategies to locate the disappeared have bloomed as the crisis of the disappeared deepens in Mexico. Central American mothers carry out annual caravans, traveling through Mexico with photographs of their children whose last known whereabouts was in Mexico. Another group of family members of disappeared have formed a Citizen’s Forensic Science committee, collecting DNA samples from relatives of people disappeared to do the genetic testing they say the Mexican government isn’t doing.

Graciela Pérez, whose daughter Milynali Piña Pérez, as well as her brother and three nephews, was disappeared as they drove along a highway in the northern state of Tamaulipas in August of 2012, is a member of the Citizen’s Forensic Science committee. She says that when she first went to the police in Tamaulipas, their archive of photographic files of bodies found in graves in the state was kept in a Hotmail account. Pérez says state officials do little to identify the bodies they find. Each of Mexico’s 32 states has its own system for dealing with mass graves, and a maze of bureaucracy means DNA tests have to be requested individually for each body found. “Many families have been forgotten; there are thousands of bodies that haven’t been identified,” said Pérez. Her group has collected DNA samples from victims around the country and is pushing the Mexican government to run their samples against unidentified bodies buried clandestinely, as well as those buried by state officials in common graves only as NN, nomen nescio, for name unknown.

Mexican officials chronically underreport the number of bodies found in clandestine graves. In a February report to legislators, Mexico’s attorney general’s office said 662 bodies had been found in 201 graves in 16 Mexican states between August 2006 and October 2015. An analysis carried out for this story found that over the same period, newspapers reported at least 2,439 bodies having been recovered from clandestine graves in 30 of Mexico’s 31 states, as well as in Mexico City. Even this higher figure is a low estimate that depends on media coverage in places where journalists have been silenced, killed, or disappeared for covering the drug war, and it doesn’t include bodies that were displayed, not buried, or, for example, 167 50-year old skulls found in a cave in Chiapas in 2012, or 61 corpses found rotting at an abandoned crematorium in Acapulco in 2015. Nor does it include more recent horrors, such as the charred remains of 300-400 people found in Tlalixcoyan, Veracruz, in February.

In November 2015, a few weeks after the cut-off for the attorney general’s report, a mass grave created by state officials in Tetelcingo, Morelos, was uncovered by a mother searching for her son. The grave contained at least 117 bodies, which were dumped—many without having been identified or DNA-tested—near a cemetery by government workers, who claim they were too overburdened and under-resourced to properly bury the bodies. The bodies were pulled from the ground in June while family members of people disappeared looked on, hoping to identify a loved one. An independent report released in August found that 84 of the 117 bodies showed signs of violence and torture, and that only eight of the bodies were identified after the exhumations. Experts say the grave shared characteristics with clandestine graves in other parts of Mexico that were attributed to the organized crime group Los Zetas.

Through it all, families continue to search, scouring forests, deserts, garbage dumps, abandoned lots, and open areas behind cemeteries. They have been threatened by organized crime and state officials; Miguel Ángel Jimenez Blanco, who initiated the searches in Iguala, was murdered last year. “It is not easy, it’s not nice at all, to pick up a shovel or a pick and go look for my child,” said Maria de la Luz López Castruita, whose daughter Irma Claribel Lamas López went missing in Torreón in 2008. López Castruita said she will continue to look for her daughter until the day she dies. “When our child disappeared, so did our fear.”

Few texts have more powerfully unraveled the political economy of the drug wars than Dawn Paley’s 2014 tour de force, Drug War Capitalism. With unrelenting clarity Paley reveals just how extensively the war on drugs permeates Latin American politics and society —from Mexico to the Andes—resulting in ever more intrusive and exploitative forms of capitalist accumulation and dispossession. Paley’s arguments—which she elaborates in conversation with sociologist William I. Robinson, journalist John Gibler, and Maya-K’iche’ scholar Gladys Tzul Tzul in the Report—are the centerpiece of this issue.

I invite you to take a look at the entire roundtable, which you can do by clicking here. What follows is my response to the texts written by Dr. William Robinson, journalist John Gibler and Dr. Gladys Tzul.

Response: Fear and Terror as Tools of Capital

On March 24, 2016, thousands of Argentines gathered in the Plaza de Mayo to remember the 40th anniversary of the 1976 military coup that ushered in a dictatorship of terror and torture. At the gathering, a statement written by organizations of family members of some of the 30,000 people who were disappeared in that period was read. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Founding Group of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Family Members of People Detained and Disappeared for Political Reasons, and HIJOS-Buenos Aires wrote with unflinching political clarity about the true aims of the war in Argentina. “With systematic terror as its method, [the military] tried to impose an economic, political, social, and cultural plan of hunger and exclusion, using a recipe written by economic groups, the government of the United States, the upper echelon of the church, and the participation of the judiciary,” the statement reads.

The groups recalled their disappeared loved ones as parents, children, sisters, brothers, but also as activists working towards a country that was “great, just, and free.” Experiences of terror and disappearance in Argentina are understood to have been political, connected to the spread of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Less than two months later, on Mother’s Day, thousands of family members of the disappeared in Mexico marched for the fifth year in a row in the capital of Mexico City, displaying the names of some of the 27,000 people who have been officially recorded as disappeared since 2006. In Mexico, especially since the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero, slogans at marches implicate the state in disappearances and call for loved ones to be returned alive: ¡Fue el estado! ¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! (It was the state! They were taken alive, we want them back alive!).

But unlike in Argentina, relatively few of the disappeared in Mexico were politically active or belonged to political organizations. Unlike in Argentina, there was no coup d’état, nor is there a military junta. Rather, in Mexico, there is a war on drugs. In the cities and rural areas that have been affected by this war, the impacts have been intense. But the political and economic interests behind the violence have largely been ignored, masked by drug war discourses, and because of the scale of the social emergency generated through state-directed terror. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in 2014 Mexico had the third highest number of fatalities in armed conflict in the world, after Syria and Iraq, and a recent study found life expectancy in Mexico has fallen due to rising homicide rates.

Part of the struggle for a better world is to make sense of the structures of violence and domination that are active all around us. My book, Drug War Capitalism, is meant as a contribution to that struggle. The argument of the book is, in a nutshell, that the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and South America is in fact a war on the people; that it is a U.S.backed, U.S.-funded war that supports Washington’s broader foreign policy objectives; and that this kind of war leads to the deployment of terror in ways that allow for the expansion of capital.

If there is one thing that is clear about the war on drugs in Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America, it’s that confusion plays a key role. Confusion is a known outcome of terror; together with fear, it is a key part of what keeps people submissive. Pilar Calveiro, herself a survivor of an Argentine torture camp, writes in her book Violencias de Estado (State Violences) that an essential characteristic of terror is “that it is a diffuse and generalized threat, which doesn’t correspond to a comprehensible logic from the parameters in force at the moment of its application.” The discourse of the war on drugs is a spectacularly confusing facade that disguises what is in fact a war on the people. William I. Robinson, John Gibler, and Gladys Tzul Tzul, whose reflections on the book are included in this section, have all had a profound influence on my own ability to make sense of the world around me. It is a huge honor for me to have such committed colleagues read and reflect upon my work.

In building my own understanding of capitalism today, I lean on William I. Robinson’s books A Theory of Global Capitalism and Transnational Conflicts, which, though published in 2003, sets the scene for the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras. His work helped me to distinguish the transnational elite from national capitalists, the former being those positioned to benefit spectacularly from drug war violence. Robinson makes a persistent point of signaling how the “legal” economy requires the “illegal” underground economy in order to function, but he doesn’t stop there. He also insists that we consider just what it is that makes a “legal” economy legal—it may be state-sanctioned, but it certainly isn’t separate from processes of terror, dispossession, and violence that, although state-directed, are most certainly criminal. When it comes to the war on drugs, mainstream media and state discourse give weight to greedy drug barons and their stashes of dollars, leaving the legal economy out of the picture. The underground economy created by the enforcement of prohibition is not insignificant. But the UN Office on Drugs and Crime calculates that an estimated 85 percent of the proceeds of the cocaine market are made in the United States. Also, the underground economy is much smaller than the “legal” economy. According to a 2012 report by British think tank Chatham House, estimates for the proceeds from the sale of illegal narcotics from Mexico to the United States range from $6.2 billion USD to $29.5 billion USD per year, equivalent to less than one percent to just over three percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product.

U.S. journalist John Gibler’s work has been incredibly important, and his journalism continues to gain relevance, because he is not walking away from the difficult and dangerous work of documenting the devastation caused by the war on drugs in Mexico, and in Guerrero state in particular. His coverage (in Spanish and English) of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students and the massacre in Iguala in September of 2014 has been among the best of any writer, and his book To Die in Mexico (2011) is a key resource on the war in Mexico. Gibler is a journalist through and through, but he doesn’t shy from theory: he asks that we consider that an immediate and devastating use of terror through “kidnapping, human trafficking, human smuggling and extortion” is in itself “a ‘new’ extractive industry of death,” which turns “human life and death into a commodity for extraction.”

The idea of the creation of an “extractive industry of death” complements the overall argument in Drug War Capitalism. It does, however, raise the question of how we can understand the many cases of disappearance where there is no extortion call and no ransom payout, and when nothing further is known about the disappeared person’s whereabouts.

Take the case of Ricardo Martínez, a 40-year-old father of three who was disappeared in Torreón, Coahuila, on May 10, 2010. “He said that in the afternoon he was going to buy a cake,” Martínez’s father, Ricardo Daniel Martínez, told me in an interview in January. “I don’t know if he did or not, because he also had to go to the bank and take out some money … I don’t know if it was when he left the bank or when he went to the supermarket to buy the cake,” the man’s father said. There was no ransom call, no eyewitness reports. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. That’s what really discourages me.” Like the case of Ricardo Martínez, there are thousands.

The second part of my reflection on Gibler’s notion of the “extractive industry of death” is the level of difficulty and danger involved in concretely researching and understanding this sphere of activity, which makes it near impossible to come to any solid understanding of its size and functioning. However, as with the drug trade, what we can investigate is how various parts of the Mexican state (and for that matter the U.S. state) organize themselves into and around these death markets. So for example, we can distinguish patterns of impunity: certain crimes, including disappearances, killings, and extortions against certain segments of the population in certain regions are permitted by state structures and often carried out with involvement by state security forces. For example, when Ricardo Daniel Martínez went to the local and state authorities to denounce the disappearance of his son, he was told that he was not allowed to make a complaint, and that he ought to be at home caring for his family. “There were many threats, everyone who was looking for their family members was threatened,” he said. “Anonymously, by phone, we were told not to go out looking for anyone.”

The “extractive industry of death” proposed by Gibler would not be possible without structural impunity, a guarantee provided by the Mexican government and reinforced by Washington. In some regions, the emergence of robust cash economies linked to extortion, disappearing, and killing may explain the intense growth of these phenomena, but I cannot help but see these economies as a smaller part of a much larger schema. Coming back to the arguments in Drug War Capitalism, in order to occur in a structural, massive manner, extortion, disappearance, and killing must be functional to the broader foreign policy interests of the United States. In this way, the policing of northward migration (of Mexicans, Central Americans, and others) has been partially outsourced to paramilitary groups like Los Zetas with deadly consequences. The conversion of local economies through extortion of small businesses has favored transnational retailers, while terror in maquila towns can serve as form of discipline aimed at workers and their families, favoring transnational corporations. And the forced displacement of people via extortion, disappearance, and killing can lead to increased control of land by outside capitalists, who put it to a wide array of uses, ranging from shipping and airports to mining and fracking.

It is also important to note that youth are disproportionately impacted by the violence of the war on drugs. What is taking place is an expanded counterinsurgency in which young men and women are being targeted for elimination—at the same time that austerity policies, associated with the government’s ongoing privatization programs, are deepened. The vital energies of entire families (and in some areas, whole neighborhoods) are invested in the search for disappeared family members, which generally involves elaborate interfacing with and dependence upon certain agencies of the state. The expanded counterinsurgency at work in Mexico today is a model for social control that serves the interests of transnational elites in Mexico and the U.S., at a huge cost to society.

Finally, the contribution of Maya-K’iche’ scholar Gladys Tzul Tzul provides an update on an increasingly violent reality in the capital city of Guatemala, and the ongoing use of states of emergency by the federal government to justify militarization in the resourcerich areas of Central America. Tzul Tzul points out that the war on drugs may appear as a new form of war, but it represents a continuation of the same violence wrought upon the people of Guatemala since the internal conflict. Her work has been essential to growing my understanding of how resistance takes shape, what communal structures look like, and how they are produced through collective work, enjoyment, and systems of governance. In parts of Guatemala, these structures and systems have been so powerful that they have elicited genocide as the only state response capable of gaining full control over members of these communal structures. This is where we can see the continuation of violence mentioned by Tzul Tzul, as the communities that today organize and refuse to give their territories over for dams, for mining, for industrial agriculture, and for cement plants are the same ones targeted for militarization, often under the pretext of stopping the flow of narcotics.

Confusion reigns in the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia, and that is just how the powerful would like it. As the media tracks Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Mexico is being structurally transformed, politically and socially. People throughout Mexico and Central America are terrorized by state and paramilitary forces, whose activities are strengthened by the war on drugs. There is little space amid the ongoing crises of fear, grief, and terror to connect the violence to economic and political factors. These wars are promoted from above, and militarization and violence stem from state forces and flow outward. We cannot lose sight of the fact that it is those who live in the countries with closest relations to the United States who are most likely to become the targets of drug war terror.

In this way, the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and South America is a twenty-first century reboot of the wars that pitted national militaries and police against communists and so-called “internal enemies” in the second half of the twentieth century— from Argentina all the way to Central America. Today, the drug war provides an updated formula to usher in systemic economic and political change and ensure social control through terror, all to the benefit of transnational capital.

]]>https://dawnpaley.ca/2016/07/22/roundtable-on-drug-war-capitalism/feed/0dawnpaleyScreen Shot 2016-07-20 at 5.19.28 PMViolence is at the Heart of US Drug War Policy in the Americashttps://dawnpaley.ca/2016/04/24/violence-is-at-the-heart-of-us-drug-war-policy-in-the-americas/
https://dawnpaley.ca/2016/04/24/violence-is-at-the-heart-of-us-drug-war-policy-in-the-americas/#respondSun, 24 Apr 2016 14:58:23 +0000http://dawnpaley.ca/?p=1011Here’s a piece I did for teleSUR on the eve of the UNGASS talks in New York last week. This piece is part of a longer piece I am working on that looks at the economics of narcotics prohibition and the funding of reactionary armed groups, which I hope to put out before the end of the year.

From April 19-21, the United Nations General Assembly will hold a special session on drugs in New York City. This meeting, called UNGASS for short, is a critical space from which the 193 member states of the U.N. could move toward adopting more humane drug policies worldwide. The special session on drugs was called for by three countries in which the militarized enforcement of prohibition has been at the root of violence and terror: Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.

Prohibition is not a hands off way of dealing with social, health or economic issues, rather, it is “an extreme form of government intervention,” according to Mark Thornton, author of “Economies of Prohibition.” Narcotics prohibition got its start as laws making certain drugs illegal were passed in the early twentieth century, spearheaded by the United States and later upheld by the U.N. From the outset, narcotics prohibition was a political tool used as a way to criminalize and target communities and individuals based on race and ethnicity.

Prohibitionist logics got a boost in the 1960s and 1970s as they were deployed by countries across the Cold War political spectrum in order to criminalize youth and social movements worldwide. Within the United States, drug prohibition has been a key contributing factor to the realization of what Angela Davis calls the “prison industrial complex” and what Mumia Abu Jamal has deemed “mass incarceration and [the] racialized prison state.”

Over time, the institutions created to enforce narcotics prohibition have become established parts of the U.S. state repressive-judicial apparatus, thus threading a dependence on maintaining prohibition into the fabric of the state. Every year since 2003, United States federal funding for demand reduction (treatment and prevention) has been lower than for supply reduction (domestic policing, interdiction, international), with the vast majority of supply reduction going to police forces nationwide. That balance is slated to shift in 2017.

Today, funding to uphold prohibition is spread across nearly the entire U.S. federal government, with 13 of the 15 Executive Departments that make up the federal Cabinet slated to receive a segment of the $31.1 billion in funding to support the National Drug Control Strategy in fiscal year 2017. The only cabinet level departments in the US government that do not receive money for the fight against narcotics are the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy.The funds for international supply control, or the international enforcement of prohibition, total $1.6 billion annually for 2015, 2016, and 2017 (requested). International supply control is by far the most expensive form of prohibition enforcement for the United States government. A 1994 estimate pegs the cost of reducing cocaine consumption in the U.S. by 1 percent at $788 million annually if realized via international supply control, $366 million per year via interdiction, $246 million per year via domestic policing, and $34 million per year via treatment.

If reducing drug use in the United States were the primary political motivation behind these programs, it would be an obvious choice as to which kinds of policies would be put in place. But as we have seen domestically and internationally, there are political implications to prohibition enforcement which cannot be calculated using the metrics of the availability of narcotics and/or their use. “Conventional drug policy has survived for so long despite compelling evidence of abject failure because dysfunctional policy has been good politics,” in the words of Alex Wodak, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation,

According to the U.S. government, international supply funds are used to “disrupt” and “disband” trafficking organizations, carry out investigations and gather intelligence, carry out monitoring and interdictions, and to enact policy changes and development programs in target nations. In 2017, the international supply funds requested for the drug war are to be doled out as follows: Department of Defense International Counternarcotics Efforts ($567.1 million), Drug Enforcement Agency ($467.9 million), Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs ($382.4 million), and the US Agency for International Development ($131.9 million).

In Mexico, the U.S. government has provided $1.5 billion “worth of training, equipment, and technical assistance” through the Merida Initiative since 2008. It is estimated that Mexico spent $79 billion over the same time period on security and public safety. In Colombia U.S. spending on Plan Colombia was much higher, at over $10 billion since the year 2000. Over the same time period, Colombia spent $200 billion on the drug war.

As I detail in my book Drug War Capitalism, the militarization of the enforcement of prohibition has allowed the U.S. government to push policies of social control through violence and militarization in Latin America; but it is host governments who provide the majority of funding for these wars against their own populations. Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative have had devastating social consequences, spurring violence and terror, spiking murder rates, pushing up disappearances, and increasing forced displacement.

The draft resolution for UNGASS includes a pledge to continue with international supply reduction efforts, through “more effective drug-related crime prevention and law enforcement measures.” Though some positive change may come out of the UNGASS special session on drugs, it will remain up to activists and social movements in the north and south to continue to push back against militarization connected to the war on drugs.

It has been far too long since I updated here. I’ve been working on a new project (details soon) in the north of Mexico, traveling here and there to talk with all different folks about Drug War Capitalism, and trying to get in some family and friend time.

I’ve done a few interviews of late, with Open Democracy (aquí en español) and Counterpunch. Finally, an Italian journal recently put out a longer piece that I co-wrote with my friend and mentor Dr. Raquel Gutiérrez called “La transformación sustancial de la guerra y la violencia contra las mujeres en México” which you can peep or download at academia.edu.

I am hoping to make it up to Historical Materialism in Toronto in May to talk about the book and some other work I’m doing around prohibition economies in the context of the “war on drugs.” Hope to see some of you there.

dawn

]]>https://dawnpaley.ca/2016/03/31/interviews-update/feed/0dawnpaleyAyotzinapa, Paradigm of the War on Drugs in Mexicohttps://dawnpaley.ca/2015/10/02/ayotzinapa-paradigm-of-the-war-on-drugs-in-mexico/
https://dawnpaley.ca/2015/10/02/ayotzinapa-paradigm-of-the-war-on-drugs-in-mexico/#respondFri, 02 Oct 2015 01:38:21 +0000http://dawnpaley.ca/?p=965Dear friends,

“It is necessary that we take action now, because they are annihilating us. It is necessary that we do something.” Nadia Vera, social anthropologist, tortured and assassinated alongside journalist Rubén Espinosa, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiróz and Mile Virginia Martín on July 31, 2015, in Mexico City.[1]

In the year since we put the final touches on the manuscript for the English edition of Drug War Capitalism, the campaign of terror directed against the people of Mexico in the name of fighting drugs has continued. This essay will serve as the epilogue for the forthcoming Spanish edition of the book, and looks back over the 10 months since it was published.

As the first edition of Drug War Capitalism was in its last stages before printing, there were rumblings that the army had massacred 22 people in Tlatlaya, in Mexico State, in June, 2014. Initial media reports presented the killings as having taken place during a firefight, and the governor of Mexico State initially claimed the army had, in “legitimate self-defense, taken down the criminals.”[2] One witness, whose daughter was among the dead, later claimed that soldiers had in fact lined up 22 before executing them one by one. The eyewitness said she told the soldiers not to do it, not to kill those being interrogated. Their response, she said, was that “these dogs don’t deserve to live.”[3] The cover-up that ensued involved bureaucrats from various levels of government. It was only because of reporting by Esquire magazine and the work of local journalists in Mexico that the truth came out. Eight soldiers are believed to have been directly involved with the killings in Tlatlaya. Seven soldiers have been charged, three of them for murder.

After the emergence of the army’s role in slaughtering civilians in Tlatlaya came the disappearance of 43 students and the murder of three others in Iguala, Guerrero. On the night of September 26, 2014, six people were killed, three of them students at a nearby teacher-training college. One young man who was killed had his face pulled off and yanked down around his neck. Others were wounded and denied medical treatment. By the next day, 43 more students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa were missing. The students were last seen as they were arrested by municipal police, allegedly for participating in taking over buses to use for transportation to a march in Mexico City. The police handed off the students to a local paramilitary group that the media dubbed Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors).

The remains of one of the missing 43 have been discovered and confirmed, but the other 42 students remain disappeared. In the search for the missing 43, groups of community police and other non-state organizations initiated one of the country’s first searches for clandestine graves. In the weeks and months following the massacre and the mass disappearance of the students, search parties made up of community police and families of the disappeared discovered mass graves containing dozens of recently buried bodies.

The impact of the forced disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normal school cannot be underestimated. It sparked the largest crisis of legitimacy the Mexican government has faced since the war on drugs began in December 2006.

Then Attourney General Murillo Karam suggested the reason they were disappeared was because the students were mistaken by one crime group as belonging to another crime group. But make no mistake: it was the state. Police officers led the killing of six people on September 26, including torturing Julio César Mondragón to death. Police detained the youth, and police in cooperation with a local paramilitary group disappeared the students. The Mexican government thought they could ride out the mass disappearance and the massacre in Iguala the same way they had done with previous killings. For weeks on end, Mexican authorities struggled to maintain their version of events. They tried to link the students to criminal activity. “They had already gone to the municipality, they weren’t [religious] sisters of charity,” said Murillo Karam of the Ayotzinapa students.[4]

Five months later, with 42 of the students still missing, the federal government closed the investigation. More recently, a forensic team working under municipal authorities in Iguala announced it was fauna nociva that tore Mondragón’s face off. [5] The parents and supporters of the 46 missing and dead young men from Ayotzinapa have continued to lead protests and reject the official versions of events.

What happened last September in Iguala is not a case of a few bad apples in the local police force. On the contrary, Ayotzinapa is akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back, exposing how the army, the Federal Police and local police act in tandem with criminal groups to sow terror. Ayotzinapa is not an exceptional case: it is paradigmatic. Groups like Guerreros Unidos, which the state calls drug cartels or drug gangs, but which can be understood as something closer to paramilitary groups, do not threaten the state or control the state. On the contrary, they can actually strengthen the state repressive apparatus. This structural collusion is why no one person or group can absorb responsibility for the disappearance of 43 young men from the Ayotzinapa school and the massacre of six people. Rather, these acts were facilitated by overlapping forms of domination, capitalism, impunity, racism, militarization and paramilitarization. These forms are created and upheld not only by the government of Mexico but also by the U.S. and other governments, and I argue in Drug War Capitalism that they can benefit transnational capital.

After Ayotzinapa, Mexicans around the country protested in numbers few could remember seeing since the Zapatista uprising 20 years prior. Government buildings were lit aflame. Nationwide, Normal Schools went on indefinite strike. The country’s largest universities observed multiple days of strike action. Students shut down high schools and colleges, held assemblies, blocked roads, and organized cultural events. Demonstrations took place around the world, with a huge upsurge in Chicanx, Latinx and Mexican-led organizing in Europe and especially in the USA.

There is a Mexico before Ayotzinapa, and another Mexico afterwards. A Mexico in which an increasingly large portion of the population understands it is the state that is responsible for much of the violence justified under the rubric of the war on drugs and organized crime.

It is important to be clear that Mexico is not a failed state. Without a doubt, it is a state that has failed the people, as states do. But it has absolutely not failed at fulfilling the duties of a state in the system of global capitalism.

Mexico is a darling of the International Monetary Fund, which noted in December 2014 “Mexico’s macroeconomic policies and policy frameworks remain very strong.”[6] After the disappearance of the 43, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto gave an address to the nation. Using the terror in Iguala as a pretext, Peña Nieto called for a deepening of structural violence and inequality in the south of the country.[7] He promised to send more Federal Police to Guerrero and Michoacán, though we know the arrival of Federal Police and soldiers is a key factor in increasing violence.

But there was another component to Peña Nieto’s speech. It came near the end and it’s directly related to the theme of this book: capitalist expansion permeates every state strategy of terror and social control. Quoting Peña Nieto:[8]

Regardless, the tragic events in Iguala also reveal a social and economic dimension behind the violence and the institutional weakness. The justice we want goes beyond the legal sphere. It also includes the reduction of poverty and the marginalization and inequality that exist in the states in the south of the country. Today there are two Mexicos: One, inserted in the global economy with increasing income levels, development and well-being. And on the other hand, there is a poorer Mexico, with age-old backwardness that has not been resolved for generations.

Peña Nieto here suggests the areas of Mexico that are furthest integrated into global capitalism are also those where there is more peace and security. We have seen this is not true, proven simply by examining the levels of violence in Ciudad Juarez and other areas along the US-Mexico border. He also suggests poverty does not exist in the parts of the country that are most integrated into the global economy, a statement that is also untrue, considering maquila workers in border regions earn around $5 per day. Finally, he suggests material poverty exists in some parts of the south because of “age-old backwardness” instead of colonization, displacement and the imposition of capitalism. Without evidence, Peña Nieto concludes, “Most of the social and political conflicts in the country have their origin precisely in the lack of development in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca.” It is worth clarifying that, in fact, social organization in those three states has made them areas where capital investment is more likely to be challenged by social organizations, and also, to acknowledge that so-called narco violence in states like Michoacán, Veracruz, Tamaulipas and Chihuahua is a form of social and political conflict.

In this context, handing over more territory to transnational corporations appears as a solution to the economic inequality mentioned by Peña Nieto. In his address to the nation, he promised new investments for highways, hospitals, and oil pipelines. Then he said, “… For the first time in our history, I propose the establishment of three special economic zones in the most backwards region of the country. These are: The Inter-Ocean Industrial Corridor in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which will connect the Pacific with the Gulf of Mexico; the second, in Puerto Chiapas, and the third, in the municipalities that are connected to the Port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacán and Guerrero. A special economic zone is an area where we will offer a regulatory framework and special incentives to attract corporations and generate quality employment.”

Economic development designed to benefit global capital is proven to contribute to structural violence. Now, what Mexican elites and transnational capitalists are proposing through their spokesperson in the Presidential Mansion affirms they are ready to take advantage of a national crisis such as that taking place in Guerrero in order to make structural changes that benefit capital. After all of that, Peña Nieto had the gall to say, “We are all Ayotzinapa,” a popular slogan in support of the 43 and their families. And with that, he promised to increase social conflict and inequality as a solution to violence.

While the tragedy of the missing students dominated headlines and discussions in Mexico, the federal government also passed the last of the regulations to privatize Mexico’s state owned oil company and open up private participation in oil and gas projects in Mexico.[9] More proof that the state of Mexico works very effectively, when it so wants. “The constitution was passed quickly, and the secondary laws were passed with blinding speed, and the regulations are being implemented,” said a Calgary-based consultant for Pemex. “Everybody I know in the Mexican government is working eighteen-hour days to get this done.”[10]

•••

The state-directed terror did not stop in Iguala. On January 6, 2015, Federal Police opened fire on members of the Fuerzas Rurales, which were protesting in the central square of Apatzingán in Michoacán. The Fuerzas Rurales were born out of the autodefensa movement, the armed uprising in rural Michoacán that caught the world’s attention last January.[11] Those men were protesting the fact they hadn’t been paid. Between two attacks that day, Federal Police murdered at least 16 people in Apatzingán. Dozens more were injured. The official version of events claimed there were nine deaths in total and the killings resulted from “friendly fire” or “crossfire” between Fuerzas Rurales and police. That version held nationally for more than three months until April when journalist Laura Castellanos released her investigative piece that blew apart the government’s line.[12]

News of other massacres and mass disappearances has also seeped through what amounts to a mass media blackout on coverage of the drug war. In July, the army attacked the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula in Michoacán. “They will not forgive the community for having dared to organize and to begin to walk their own path, far from political parties and the tricks of electoralism,” wrote journalists Alejandro Amado and Heriberto Paredes following the army attack.[13] In the Guerrero municipality of Chilapa, fifty people have been registered as disappeared since March, and at least another 44 people have been disappeared from the same region but not yet registered as such. In Chilapa in the midst of ongoing conflicts, including open conflict between organized crime groups, civilians who self-identify as community police have co-operated with Federal Police to take over local security operations.

Events in Chilapa have become emblematic of the increasing co-optation of the “community” label by armed groups. “In two years—starting with the first rupture in the CRAC-PC—the term ‘community’ has been deformed in various ways, losing its original meaning that was synonymous with justice. Conflicts between these fractions and their fateful results have corrupted the term ‘community,’” according to a report published online at the independent news site Subversiones.[14]

After Ayotzinapa, the deluge. In the spring, violence also displaced hundreds of people from San Miguel Totolapan and also in Guerrero, part of a mining district rich in gold, silver, lead and zinc where multiple exploration concessions have been granted. Attacks by police on behalf of feudal-style bosses wounded 70 people in San Quintín, Baja California, and were met with protests around the country. But Mexico was silent as more than 2,000 people were pushed from their communal lands in the town of Sonoyta, which lies on the border with Arizona. According to locals who were displaced, 40 bodies were hung at the kiosk in the central park of the village on April 30 though the official count was three dead.[15] Around the same time, reports surfaced of another massacre perpetrated by Federal Police, this time at a ranch between Ecuandureo and Tanhuato in Michoacan. The outcome: 42 civilians, some of them armed, all dead along with one Federal Police officer.[16]

Mexico’s national statistics agency reported more than 121,000 homicides during the six years Calderón was president, which is just over twice as many as during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2001-2006). According to a new report from the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego, “No other country in the hemisphere has seen such a large increase in the number or rate of homicides over the last decade.”[17] As I prepared this introduction, INEGI released its yearly homicide numbers: There were 19,669 homicides in Mexico in 2014. This number is down from a peak of more than 27,000 homicides in 2011, but at 16 homicides per 100,000, this remains well above the rates before the drug war.

Empirical research is beginning to affirm state responsibility in rising murder rates in Mexico. A recent report published in American Statistician found that where there were military interventions during the drug war during Calderon’s term, there were more murders. According to the article, “The military interventions resulted in an increase in the average homicide rate” in 18 regions of Mexico. One of the telling tidbits in the report is that there is not “a comprehensive list of interventions,” which is to say we don’t even know about all of the military interventions that have taken place in Mexico since December 2006.

Internal displacement is also on the rise. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), in 2014 there were at least 281,000 people displaced by violence in Mexico. Numbers are similarly staggering in Central America. Colombia, which launched a peace process with the FARC in December 2012, chalked in with 137,200 people displaced that year, bringing the total there to 6,044,200.[18] As with the homicide rate, the number of people displaced in Mexico could be much higher than reported. According to the IDMC, in Mexico, “Aside from the 23 mass events [leading to internal displacement] recorded in 2014, many people are thought to flee in small numbers and find their own solutions, effectively making them invisible and the true scale of displacement hard to gauge.”[19]

State-perpetrated killings and terror are taking place in Mexico at a time of unprecedented co-operation in military and police training between Mexico and the United States. As I explore in Drug War Capitalism, the US backed Merida Initiative is a key factor in escalating the violence in Mexico. Between 2008 and 2014, the United States trained more than 22,000 federal and state police in Mexico.The Intercept reported that five members of the battalion involved in the massacre in Tlatlaya were trained by the US Northern Command.[20]

We are told this training will lead to better policing, an idea with surprising credibility under the circumstances. As evidence of more state-sponsored massacres continues to surface, police across the United States have been the focus of outspoken resistance and mass protests in the wake of repeated cop killings of young (mostly) African-American men and women. The problem of police violence in the United States has led to increased calls to disarm and disband police and abolish prisons.

The example of the US SWAT team has been taken up locally in states like Coahuila with disastrous results. Take the case of Hotensia Rivas Rodriguez, whose son Víctor was taken from his house by members of Coahuila’s elite SWAT team (Special Weapons and Tactics Group-GATE), which formed in 2009. When Rivas Rodriguez went to the GATE’s headquarters in Piedras Negras, she was received by one of the men who participated in the disappearance of her son. She managed to catch a glimpse of Víctor in one of their vehicles but has not heard anything since.

“I know, we all know. It’s an open secret what is happening in Coahuila,” said Rivas in an interview in Mexico City, adding her belief that her son’s disappearance has to do with the SWAT team operating in the state. The GATEs, she said, “Are a group that the governor allowed to operate in Coahuila to increase security. But in reality, what they’re doing is disappearing people. They are the criminals because it is them who took my son, all of our disappeared, the majority, were taken by [GATEs]. It is the authorities, that’s what is happening in Coahuila.”

Familias Unidas say the GATEs have been involved in at least 60 cases of forced disappearance in the region. The group has also been accused of carrying out threats, arbitrary detentions, intimidations, robbery and beatings, and even of planting explosive devices at a police station and a city hall in the border city of Nuevo Laredo.[21] According to Ariana García Bosque, a lawyer who works with Familias Unidas, GATEs routinely detain people and torture them for two or three days before handing them over to authorities, justifying their actions by claiming the detained were involved in organized crime. Meanwhile, the governor of Coahuila has dismissed claims that GATEs are involved in criminal activity.[22]

Family members and communities are increasingly resisting police violence and abuses. Families United in Coahuila has developed a rapid response strategy wherein members head straight to GATE headquarters when a disappearance is reported, and sometimes that effort meets success when a disappeared person is found alive (often in prisons in other states). Longstanding community resistance to state violence has also created organizations like the Community Police in Guerrero State (CRAC-PC). And this resistance also led to the recent explosion of autodefensa groups in Michaoacán last year. Among the first actions of many of these groups was to disarm local police, which are considered the prime predators on community members. Mexico’s latest police scandal—the massacre of members of the factions of the autodefensa movement who cooperated with state efforts to legalize—is a message to self-defense groups of all stripes that even co-operation does not guarantee survival.

Tlatlaya, Ayotzinapa, and Apatzingán are four places whose names today conjure the most recent examples of naked state violence in Mexico. As we’ve seen, however, there are many more areas of the country where tragedy is an everyday affair. We don’t know how many more events like these have taken place in past years. The number of mass graves being discovered (again, we only know about a fraction of those that are found) and the amount of people who have been disappeared in Mexico since 2006 (more than 27,000) indicate these three events could represent but the tip of the iceberg of state violence in a drawn out war on the people.

Then there’s the story of the villain. When Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman was captured in February 2014, I was well into writing the manuscript for Drug War Capitalism. A friend of mine got in touch and asked if I was going to include his capture in my book. I didn’t and explained this was because the true impacts of the activities of El Chapo are mercurial, based in speculation and unknowable in fact. Building an analysis about what is taking place in Mexico around one man is a too-limited lens through which to understand the form that war takes. Good thing too: El Chapo tunneled out of prison in July 2015. For weeks, the ensuing search for El Chapo dominated media coverage of Mexico. Pundits and journalists claimed his escape had set back US-Mexico relations by a decade. They said it was the most embarrassing thing Peña Nieto’s government had ever dealt with (as if Ayotzinapa never happened, as if 42 of the students were not still disappeared).

Coverage of El Chapo’s escape eclipsed attacks against people in Michoacán and Guerrero as well as the first oil block auctions in 75 years, providing one example of how dominant narratives on the drug war serve to obscure important events taking place simultaneously. The mainstream media’s take on the war on drugs includes a focus on the telling of certain stories, like the escape of El Chapo or conflict between inter-cartel rivalries while ignoring killings, displacements and disappearances as well as economic events that are transforming Mexican society.

As the hunt for El Chapo carried on, the Mexican government announced the bidding results for the first round of oil exploration contracts. Two offshore concessions were granted to a consortium of companies from Mexico, the US and the UK. This marked the first time in more than 75 years that oil exploration contracts were granted to private oil companies in Mexico. It was the first and smallest of five oil block auctions to take place in Mexico as part of the first round of concessions granted in Mexico’s newly privatized oil sector.

The upcoming portion of Round 1 auctions of conventional and non-conventional oil fields, slated to take place in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon along the Mexico-US border, as well as in the state of Veracruz, are some of the most conflictive regions of the country. Much of this oil-rich region is said to be under the control of the Zetas, a drug cartel which has been known to disappear on-duty oil workers employed by the state-owned oil company, Pemex. It remains to be seen how the Zetas will interact with the private oil companies that sign on to explore the blocks that will be auctioned off by Mexico’s National Hydrocarbons Agency. Similarly, many of the regions within Michoacán and Guerrero that have been experiencing state-directed terror and other violence are rich in minerals or areas with profitable agricultural production.

Beyond high profile gun battles that sometimes make the news, little is known about the nature of violence and repression faced by residents in cities and rural areas in Tamaulipas, which has long been known as a no-go state for journalists. The killing of photojournalist Ruben Espinosa and four others, including Nadia Vera (quoted in the epigraph), in a central neighborhood of Mexico City on July 31, 2015, returned attacks on journalists to the spotlight. Espinosa had fled Veracruz for the relative safety of Mexico City after experiencing intimidation in the city of Xalapa in June. Since Javier Duarte became governor of Veracruz state in December 2010, 14 reporters there have been killed or disappeared.[23]

•••

As massacres, disappearances and mass displacements remained the norm in various parts of Mexico, attacks on migrants transiting the country carried on. Between October 2013 and October 2014, 60,000 unaccompanied minors crossed the US-Mexico border.[24] Most of them were from Honduras, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. These arrivals marked a spike in Central American minors trying to cross the border. (The number of Mexican minors has remained relatively stable; Mexican children are deported without a court hearing and thus not detained for significant lengths of time.)

Many of the youth held in custody by US Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) were subjected to measures that would be considered objectionable against anyone, convicted adults or otherwise. Accusations against the CPB, in a complaint filed in June on behalf of 100 children by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups, are truly grotesque.[25] They include “denying necessary medical care to children as young as five-months-old, refusing to provide diapers for infants, confiscating and not returning legal documents and personal belongings, making racially charged insults and death threats, and strip-searching and shackling children in three-point restraints during transport.” On a visit to McAllen, Texas, in March, I learned from nurses and support workers that children were kept in dog kennels, and that social workers at the border were not allowed to stay in contact with the youth when they were shipped to other parts of the US (including to a military base) to be held.

After reaching a peak in June 2014, the number of unaccompanied minors arriving to the United States has fallen off from more than 10,000 to a few thousand a month.[26] This owes in large part to Mexico deporting more Central American minors. As fewer Central American kids arrived at the US border, the issue and the plight of these children slid out of view but not before US Vice President Joe Biden and Central American leaders used their struggle to promote a renewed version of drug war capitalism, which they called the Alliance for Prosperity.

According to Biden, who asked Congress for US $1 billion to fund the Alliance for Prosperity, the plan promotes security, good governance and economic growth in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. (The plan was authored this past fall by those countries’ presidents.) Total funding for the Alliance for Prosperity over five years is projected at $25 billion. US funding makes up 20 per cent of the total investment. The remaining 80 per cent would come from the Inter American Development Bank, other international financial institutions and host governments.

Biden, who was an “architect” of Plan Colombia, compared the transformation needed in Central America to that of Colombia. Beginning in 2000, the US spent $9 billion on Plan Colombia, and the country “cleaned up its courts, vetted its police force and reformed its rules of commerce to open up its economy,” according to Biden.[27]

But there are a few things Biden didn’t mention about the current security situation in Central America. He didn’t mention that the US has already been funding a Plan Colombia-style program in Central America, known as the Central America Regional Security Initiative. Nor did he mention that violence and, in particular, homicides in Central America have been on the rise as US security funding rolled in.

The first call for an “Alliance for Prosperity and Peace” between the US and Latin America came from Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in December 2013. Santos referred to reviving John F. Kennedy’s controversial “Alliance for Progress.” Following a meeting in Washington with representatives from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, Santos said the following: “We agreed that we would see how we could materialize that initiative. I think it could be a very productive initiative for all of the Americas.”[28]

It is no coincidence that the first mention of an Alliance for Prosperity came from Colombia. Its position as a vanguard for US interests in the hemisphere took shape over the course of Plan Colombia. As I outline in the book, the stated goal was cutting the flow of narcotics to the US, but Plan Colombia did little to reduce the amount of drugs reaching the United States. It did, however, succeed in advancing the overall goals of US foreign policy. Guided by the work of Professor William I. Robinson, I understand those goals as essentially connected to ensuring the expansion of transnational capitalism worldwide.

The centrepiece of the Alliance for Prosperity is the construction of a new gas pipeline from Salina Cruz, which is in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, to Esquintla, Guatemala. Salina Cruz is on the Pacific Ocean, it hosts the southernmost refinery in Mexico and is connected to Mexico’s main pipeline infrastructure. A pipeline to Esquintla will traverse more than 650 kilometres, a path that will cut through Chiapas and Guatemala’s coastal regions. The argument here is that the natural gas pipeline will lower energy costs in the region. That is of course speculation. What we can say with certainty is that this pipeline is about opening a new market for fracked gas from the US (and perhaps eventually from Mexico). It does nothing to reduce Central America’s dependency on purchasing fossil fuels. But it does promise that businesses will be able to use this fuel at reduced rates.

The Alliance for Prosperity proposes the expansion of Central America’s common electricity supply and interconnection with Mexico and Panama. This means more powerlines, more dams and more environmental conflict. A year and a half ago in Honduras, state forces attacked Indigenous Lenca communities resisting a hydroelectric project and one opponent was killed.[29] The interconnection with Mexico represents, in fact, an interconnection with the US market, and the interconnection with Panama means Andean and Central American power markets would be linked.[30]

The Alliance for Prosperity foresees nine new logistics corridors, which is to say highways, in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It proposes a single window to for investors, streamlining the permitting process. It tailors education to corporate needs. It promotes new free trade zones, more maquiladoras and tax breaks for corporate investors. It proposes a new round of what I call toilets for tourists, basically insuring better infrastructure for visitors.

It proposes more police training and professionalization. It subsumes national security in these three countries to the logic of the war on drugs.

The Alliance for Prosperity ought to be on our radars over the coming months and years. Unfortunately for the people of Central America, it is unlikely this plan will do anything to address the structural factors causing migration. Rather, the Alliance for Prosperity is another formula that aggravates environmental conflicts and increases environmental risks, feeding the growing gap between rich and poor, and promoting the drug war model of public security, which, as we have seen is based on criminalizing the poorest—as well as the most organized—segments of society.

Drug War Capitalism is a proposal, a provocation. It requires us to come to terms with the fact that conflicts in Mexico and Central America are among the world’s bloodiest, both ranking just after Syria and Iraq as the regions with the highest fatalities in 2014.[31] It is not a book about narco-trafficking; instead, the focus is on the war against drugs, a form of war that is expanding globally. In the first (English) edition, I noted that West Africa could be the next area where the US exports the war on drugs. This has since come true. In July 2015, Washington announced the West Africa Regional Security Initiative (WACSI), a plan similar to Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, which will be carried out in Benin, Cabo Verde, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Togo.[32]

[33] Special thanks to Justin Karter for research assistance, Jorge Comensal and Megan H. Stewart for their important edits and comments on the text, and Charles Weigl at AK Press for layout and publishing. This essay will appear as the epilogue to the forthcoming Spanish version of Drug War Capitalism, to be published by Sur Plus in Mexico City. Some of the reporting in the afterword has appeared in other publications, including Warscapes, The New Republic, and Pueblos en Camino.

]]>https://dawnpaley.ca/2015/10/02/ayotzinapa-paradigm-of-the-war-on-drugs-in-mexico/feed/0dawnpaleySearching for the Disappeared in Coahuilahttps://dawnpaley.ca/2015/08/14/searching-for-the-disappeared-in-coahuila/
https://dawnpaley.ca/2015/08/14/searching-for-the-disappeared-in-coahuila/#respondFri, 14 Aug 2015 02:26:56 +0000http://dawnpaley.ca/?p=963A new piece I wrote forWarscapes.

August 8, 2015

This Mother’s Day, Hortensia Rívas Rodriguez wasn’t at home enjoying brunch with her family. Instead, she traveled from her home in Piedras Negras to join thousands of other mothers searching for their disappeared children in Mexico. Rivas Rodriguez, a retired police officer, founded a group called the Association of Families United in Searching and Finding Disappeared People in August, 2013, just over a month after her son Víctor Manuel Guajardo disappeared.

Since its founding, the group has gone from representing eleven families to including over 160 cases of forced disappearances in a region directly across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, that includes the city of Piedras Negras, and the towns of Allende, Morelos, Nava, Villa Unión, and Zaragoza. Rivas claims that in less than two years, her group has managed to find around eighty of those disappeared. Some were found dead. Others were tracked down to police stations, army bases, and prisons where they were found alive, but tortured and beaten by government officials.

Rivas Rodriguez’ son Víctor was taken from his house while his wife and children watched. The kidnappers were members of Coahuila’s elite SWAT team (Special Weapons and Tactics Group-GATE), which was formed in 2009. When Rivas went to the GATE’s headquarters in Piedras Negras, she was received by one of the men who participated in the disappearance of her son. She managed to catch a glimpse of Víctor in one of their vehicles, but has never heard anything since.

“I know, we all know, it’s an open secret what is happening in Coahuila,” said Rivas in an interview in Mexico City, and it has to do with the SWAT team operating in the state. The GATEs “are a group that the governor allowed to operate in Coahuila, to increase security, he said. But in reality, what they’re doing is disappearing. They are the criminals, because it is them who took my son, all of our disappeared, the majority, were taken by [the GATEs]. It is the authorities, that’s what is happening in Coahuila.”

Families United say the GATEs have been involved in at least sixty cases of forced disappearance in the region. The group has also been accused of carrying out threats, arbitrary detentions, intimidations, robberies, and beatings, and even of planting explosive devices at a police station and a city hall in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. According to Ariana García Bosque, a lawyer who works with Families United, GATEs routinely detain and torture people for two or three days before handing them over to authorities. They justify their actions by allegedly claiming the detained were involved in organized crime. Meanwhile, the governor of Coahuila has dismissed out of hand claims that the GATEs are involved in criminal activity.

The swelling ranks of Families United is a testament to the ongoing crisis of forced disappearances in the state of Coahuila. Two other members of the organization I interviewed at the Mother’s Day march told me how their sons were disappeared and how, in both cases, government agents were involved in perpetrating or covering up the crimes.

Ana María, from Allende, Coahuila, told a chilling story that puts official involvement in forced disappearance on full display. On March 2, 2012, after he had gone out to run an errand, her son, José Willyvaldo Martinez Sandoval, didn’t return home. When she called local police to ask if they’d seen her son, Ana María was told he’d been arrested for drinking in public.

The next morning he was dropped off at his house by a municipal police officer, badly beaten and tortured. Later that day, an armed commando entered the family home and kidnapped Willyvaldo’s older brother who was beaten and eventually brought to hospital by municipal police. The armed men returned to Ana María’s house yet again and snatched Willyvaldo a second time, disappearing him. Willyvaldo has never been seen again. “I want answers about the disappearance of my son three years ago,” said Ana María. “I want to know where they left him.”

And though she marched together with thousands of people in Mexico City, Ana María was afraid to give her full name for fear of reprisals. Allende is a town of approximately 20,000 people where everyone knows everyone, she said. Fear reigns.

Yolanda Gonzalez Gómez traveled to the march and walked, holding an image of her son Julian Prieto Gonzalez, who was disappeared March 31, 2010 in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, together with two other youths and an older man. The men were crossing from McAllen, Texas, and were last heard from when they stopped for something to eat along the way. In August of the same year, the family was provided with an updated photo of Julian, and was alerted that their son had been located. He was at the District Attorney’s Office in Escobedo, on the edge of the city of Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon. Upon arriving, the family was told by authorities that the young man had never been there.

Gonzalez Gómez has since seen new photographs of her son with serious wounds posted on Facebook, leading her to investigate a hospital in the Dominican Republic where the young man is alleged to have been interned, without success. Gonzalez Gómez and her husband, who live on approximately US$300 a month, borrowed money to be able to make the trip to Mexico City and hold their son’s face up among the multitude of images of the disappeared during the march that day.

Being linked with a group like Families United helps the women in their search, and connecting with other families searching for their disappeared relatives provides some solace, they said. But the pain and heartbreak of not knowing where their children are is something they live with every day.

The crisis in northern Coahuila, which is driven by state forces and maintained by iron clad impunity, is but one of the violent epicenters of the war on drugs in Mexico. At least 27,000 people have been disappeared in Mexico since the war on drugs began in Mexico in December, 2006. The mass disappearance of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero has raised national and international awareness about state involvement in these crimes, which appears to increase in frequency as militarization increases in the name of fighting the drug war.

It is difficult to understand exactly why these disappearances happen. Unlike in Argentina in the 1970s, or in urban areas in Guatemala during the internal conflict, authorities are not known to be working from lists in order to target victims. Rather, entire groups of young men of a certain age and from poorer families appear to be targeted en masse, though of course people from other demographics are also among the disappeared. The question of why this is happening in Mexico is one that may become clearer as time passes.

But for people directly affected by this war, like Hortensia Rivas, such questions are of little import. “I used to ask myself why they would take [the young men away]… Now, I don’t even ask that, now, I just ask where they are, that’s the only thing I want to know,” she said.

]]>https://dawnpaley.ca/2015/08/14/searching-for-the-disappeared-in-coahuila/feed/0dawnpaleyTexas Denies US Born Babies Birth Certificateshttps://dawnpaley.ca/2015/07/28/texas-denies-us-born-babies-birth-certificates/
https://dawnpaley.ca/2015/07/28/texas-denies-us-born-babies-birth-certificates/#respondTue, 28 Jul 2015 22:03:57 +0000http://dawnpaley.ca/?p=960Here’s a piece I did for teleSUR English on recent events regarding the legal status of babies born to undocumented parents in Texas.

Ever Duarte’s youngest daughter was born in McAllen, Texas, on December 11, 2014, the last of three children in the Duarte family. Duarte, who is from Reynosa, Mexico, just across the border from the city of McAllen, has lived on the U.S. side of the border for over 10 years. He and his partner are both undocumented, but until the birth of their third child, they had sought – and received – Texas birth certificates for their children, who are also U.S. citizens.

“It has been seven months since she was born, in December, and they continue to deny us the birth certificate,” said Duarte in a phone interview from McAllen. His other two children were issued birth certificates when both parents presented their Mexican passports and what is called a Matricula Consular, an identity document issued by Mexican consulates. “We feel that we’re being discriminated against, we need her birth certificate, we want to baptize her and in the parish they require the birth certificate, and she’ll need it in the future, for her vaccines and to go to school,” said Duarte.

Duarte said they have gone four times to request their baby daughter’s birth certificate, and that the city and county officials issuing the documents told them the order not to accept matriculas came from Austin, the Texas state capital. Like others, the family was told the child could return when she is 18 years old to collect her birth certificate. It was media reports that first alerted Duarte to the fact that his family wasn’t the only one facing this situation.

The Duartes are among a dozen of families joining a lawsuit with over 40 plaintiffs, which was filedJune 11 in a Federal District Court in West Texas.

“We had reports of people being denied birth certificates in 2013, but then it really started picking up in late 2014, and then early this year,” said Efrén Olivares, an attorney with the South Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the parents. “I don’t know what caused that, but the timing coincides with the flood of Central American immigrants and refugees last summer, and then with the the President’s announcement of executive action, and specifically DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents], in November of last year.”

DAPA would prevent Homeland Security from deporting parents of Americans, though it’s implementation is being blocked by a separate Texas court order.

Before the reports of undocumented families being denied birth certificates were sporadic and people were having problems but they were not being turned away for good, according to Olivares. But now city and county officials are turning parents away for good, affecting dozens if not hundreds of youth and children.

The issue started gathering steam as people came out and told their stories to community organizations in South Texas. Because of media attention, more and more families are coming forward with similar cases. This is testament of the strength of the incredible network of community organizations in the Rio Grande Valley.

“The argument is very basic at heart because these children are U.S. citizens, they were all born in hospitals, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. constitution says that anyone who is born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, so they are entitled to a birth certificate, and the state of Texas cannot deny them that,” said Olivares. “That is the core legal argument.”

While the majority of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Mexican, one is Guatemalan and one is Honduran. Many of the plaintiffs left Mexico fleeing violence and partner abuse. One of the plaintiffs was apprehended and detained with her infant daughter shortly after her birth by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her documents were seized and never returned. Some of the plaintiffs arrived when they were minors, meaning they never had a Mexican driver’s license or electoral card. One of the plaintiffs, who fled violence in Guatemala, was told by the coyote who was moving her group across the border that they should throw their IDs away, because if drug cartel members caught them with identification they would charge them more to cross.

According to the lawsuit, the denial of birth certificates affects the ability of families to baptize their children, to send them to school, to travel and prove their relationship to their children, to access social housing and daycare, as well as to access Medicaid, Head Start and other child benefits.

“The objectives of the lawsuit are twofold, first of all to get a birth certificate for these individual children, but more broadly, also to get a clear guidance and a clear statement from the state agency as to what other people in similar situations need to do in order to get a birth certificate,” said Olivares in a phone interview from Alamo, Texas. “What we don’t want is for all these kids to get a birth certificate and then the case is dismissed, but then next month we’re going to be back with the same problem.”

Life for undocumented people in the U.S. is difficult, and the denial of birth certificates represents another form of official discrimination against them. “What’s happening now is they’re being discriminated against, even though the child is a citizen and has a constitutional right to a birth certificate, the child and the parent are being discriminated against because they are undocumented,” said Hector Guzman Lopez, who works with Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center and the South Texas Civil Rights Project.

Increased policing along the entire U.S.-Mexico border has cut the mobility of undocumented people. By way of example, undocumented people cannot leave the Rio Grande Valley without risking their lives.

“Undocumented people are essentially trapped to a large degree in the Rio Grande Valley here on the U.S. border, there’s another checkpoint as you go north, and if you don’t have any documents you can’t pass there, you will be picked up and put in a detention center,” said Guzman. “Either you risk your life going through the brush, or you pay somebody to sneak you across, which is very dangerous as well, so most people who are undocumented workers and their families, they stay in the Valley.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services and others named in the lawsuit filed a motion to dismiss the case on July 22, claiming that Texas has sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment.

But the plaintiffs are not backing down and the legal case is growing, with more families, like the Duartes, joining the list of plaintiffs. “We’re not bad people, we try and do everything legally, especially for [our children] because we can’t [get papers], but they can,” said Duarte.

Dawn Paley is a journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism, AK Press 2014. Follow her on Twitter @dawn_

The first attack came at 2:30am on January 6, 2015. Federal Police opened fire on members of the Fuerzas Rurales, who were protesting in the central square of Apatzingán, in Michoacán. The Fuerzas Rurales were born of the co-optation of part of the autodefensa movement, the armed uprising in rural Michoacan that caught the world’s attention last January. The men were protesting the fact that they hadn’t been paid.

According to a report by journalist Laura Castellanos, eyewitnesses heard a shout from the Federal Police before they opened fire: “Kill them like dogs.” An unknown number of people were killed, some with their hands up, down on their knees.

Six hours later Federal Police attacked again just down the street from City Hall, this time opening fire on trucks carrying members of the Fuerzas Rurales and their families.

An anonymously posted YouTube video shows the carnage. One man in a red-striped shirt lays face-up on the road. A pool of blood connects him with two other men. He moves his left arm as if scratching his head. The other two lay completely still. All three are on the driver’s side of a bullet-ridden white pick-up. Behind the truck lay two other men, one on his stomach, the other on his back.

Between the two attacks that day, at least sixteen people were murdered by Federal Police in Apatzingán. Dozens more were injured. In a macabre twist, two of the wounded men were dumped on the sidewalk in front of a hospital by bystanders who rescued them. Neither has been seen since.

The official version of events claimed that there were nine deaths in total, and that the killings resulted from “friendly fire” or “crossfire” between Fuerzas Rurales and police. That version held nationally for over three months, until Castellanos released her investigative piece in late April which blew through the government’s line.

Events in Apatzingán mark the third time since last June that federal forces in Mexico are known to have participated in massacres and mass disappearances.

On June 30, 2014 twenty-one men and one woman were executed by soldiers in Tlataya, a rural area in Mexico State. The local governor maintained that the army had, in “legitimate self-defense, taken down the criminals.” One witness, whose daughter was among the dead, claimed that soldiers had in fact lined up the twenty-two people killed before executing them one by one. The eyewitness said she told the soldiers not to do it, not to kill those being interrogated. Their response, she reported, was that “these dogs don’t deserve to live.”

The cover-up that ensued involved bureaucrats from various levels of government. It was only because of reporting by Esquire magazine and the work of local journalists in Mexico that the truth about what happened in Tlatlaya came out. Eight soldiers are believed to have been directly involved in the killings. Seven have been charged, three of them for murder.

The massacre in Tlatlaya was quickly overshadowed by another perpetrated by police and gunmen in Iguala, Guerrero. On the night of September 26, 2014, six people were killed, three of them students at a nearby teacher-training college. One of the young men who was killed had his face pulled off and pulled down around his neck. Others were denied medical treatment. By the next day, forty-three more students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa were missing. A ll of the students were last seen as they were being arrested by municipal police, allegedly for participating in taking over buses in order to use for transportation to a march in Mexico City. The police handed the students off to a local paramilitary group, which the media dubbed Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors). The students remain disappeared.

In the words of writer John Gibler, who wrote an extensive piece about the events of September 26-27 in Iguala:

Although it was neither an isolated event nor the largest massacre in recent years, what occurred in Iguala has struck at the core of Mexican society. Perhaps it was the scale of the violence, or the sheer brutality, or that the victims were college students, or that the perpetrators were mostly municipal police, or that the mayor of Iguala, his wife, and the police chief were probably behind the attack, or that the state and federal governments were deceptive in their investigation and callous in their treatment of the mothers and fathers of the murdered, wounded, and disappeared. Whatever the cause—and it was likely a combination of all these reasons—it is impossible to overstate the effect of the attacks on the country.

Tlatlaya, Ayotzinapa, Apatzingán. Three massacres perpetrated by state forces in less than a year in Mexico. Three massacres that we know about, though there could well be more. In Tlatlaya and Apatzingán, the government claimed that that killings came in the context of an armed battle. In Iguala, they tried to claim that criminal groups had confused the students for other criminals, and suggested that the students could have been involved in criminal activity.

In Tlatlaya, Ayotzinapa and Apatzingán, because of journalists and eyewitnesses, the government line didn’t stick. But how many times has it?

There have been at least 140,000 homicides in Mexico since the 2007. In December 2006, Felipe Calderón was inaugurated, he immediately went to work declaring a war on drugs and organized crime. Mexico’s national statistics agency reported over 121,000 homicides during the six years Calderón was president, which is just over twice as many as during the Presidency of Vicente Fox (2001-2006). According to a new report from the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego, “No other country in the hemisphere has seen such a large increase in the number or rate of homicides over the last decade.”

Another recent report published in American Statistician found that where there were military interventions during the drug war during Calderon’s term, there were more murders. According to the article, “the military interventions resulted in an increase in the average homicide rate” in eighteen regions of Mexico. One of the telling tidbits in the report is that there is not “a comprehensive list of interventions,” which is to say that we don’t even know about all of the military interventions that have taken place in Mexico since December 2006.

The state-perpetrated killings which have stunned Mexico have come at a time of unprecedented cooperation in military and police training between Mexico and the United States. Between 2008 and 2014, the United States trained over 22,000 federal and state police in Mexico. Washington came on board to back the drug war in Mexico and coordinate with security forces throughout the country through the Merida Initiative, on which the United States spent over $2 billion between 2008 and the end of 2014. The Interceptreported recently that five members of the batallion involved in the massacre in Tlatlaya were trained by the US Northern Command.

We are told that this training will lead to better policing, an idea with surprising credibility under the circumstances. As evidence of more state-sponsored massacres continues to surface, police across the United States have been the focus of outspoken resistance and mass protests in the wake of repeated cop killings of young (mostly) Black men. Indeed, the problem of police violence in the United States has led to increased calls to disarm and disband police and abolish prisons.

In Mexico, meanwhile, concrete experiences of community resistance to police violence and abuses have resulted in successful organizations like the Community Police in Guerrero State (CRAC-PC). They have also led to moments of organization like those which saw the creation of the autodefensa groups in Michaoacán last year—among the first actions of many of these groups was the disarming of local police, understood as prime predators on community members. Mexico’s latest police scandal—the massacre of members of the factions of the autodefensa movement who cooperated with state efforts to legalize—is a message to self-defense groups of all stripes that even cooperation does not guarantee survival.

Ongoing surges in violence attributed to drug cartels (or what are, more likely, paramilitary groups), like the shooting down of a military helicopter and dozens of fiery blockades in the state of Jalisco in early May, or ongoing events in the state of Tamaulipas, sow confusion and are used to reinforce calls for reformed and better police and military institutions as safeguards against the extreme violence of non-state actors. But there is a limit to these kinds of calls, a limit that dwells in the terror inflicted by state forces against civilians with near total impunity.

Tlatlaya, Ayotzinapa, and Apatzingán are three places whose names today conjure the most recent examples of naked state violence in Mexico. We don’t know how many more events like these have taken place over past years. The number of mass graves being discovered (again, we know about only a fraction of all of those which are found) and the amount of people who have been disappeared in Mexico since 2006 (over 27,000) indicate that these three events could represent but the tip of the iceberg of state violence in a drawn out war on the people.